Direction-of-the-pharmacy from my apartment has slim options for cafes within easy walking distance. There’s Starbucks and McDonald’s, and the latter has cheaper coffee and still has WiFi, and despite the signs everywhere declaring that staying longer than 30 minutes is loitering and that the manager must enforce this restriction, nobody’s ever bugged me. This has held across locations; I frequently work in schools where your nearby options for coffee are the convenience store or a fast food joint, and I often drive out a couple hours early to avoid the worst of traffic.
There’s an old folks meeting at the table next to me, I assume of a neighborly and regular nature. Older folks trickle in and sit at the same table* to kvetch. At one point old man says clearly: “It doesn’t get better as you get older.” Talk of some kind of test result. I glance over and the two old men that were at the table at that point are staring into the middle distance, down, way-it-goes kind of resignation. So I just sit “with” them, and listen, and think. I too have this nature; I too will grow old: this is inescapable. They too were once young, once felt a vague sense of distance and dread around the ailments of old age. I send them wishes of loving-kindness and peace. And I think.
May I have the wisdom of this old Joshua tree. Tell me what you know. (Photo from Joshua Tree NP February 2026)
Kind of, you know, whatever.
I’m reading Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe bildungsroman** and the titular character has a massive hate-on, specifically, explicitly, for Brahms, and as I can’t recall any works offhand I’m listening to Brahms right now and… I don’t know, doesn’t seem that bad. Kind of flat and insipid but fine enough. Then again I am not exactly a musical prodigy (Christophe, the character) or a musical critic (Rolland himself).
Addendum: WOULD YOU FUCK OFF??
WOULD YOU PLEASE. FUCK RIGHT THE FUCK OFF.
*The first old guy to get there comes by my table and says “Just so you know, we were going to sit there, but that’s okay.” And I offer to move (it *is* a larger table but as place was empty-ish I felt fine taking it for myself) but he just throws up his hands and says, “No, no; I’m just sayin…” and walks away. I don’t respond to vague innuendo mind games so I stayed put. Look, I offered.
**Well, where I am in the story thus far he’s only a young man, so thus far the story has been this.
My dentist’s offering of stuff-you-watch-on-the-ceiling-TV includes the Bob Ross channel, and as I’m prone to establishing rituals I turn to it when I’m getting work done. Jaw issues that make dental work taxing aside, while I affect calm as an adult deep down I am still That Kid at the dentist who is a crying nightmare the littler kids next rooms down are staring at wondering “WTF is wrong with that kid”. It’s a way of self-soothing*. I also just like watching painting videos.
It is a little surprising, when one thinks on it: there is a streaming channel–replete with sudden commercials, which were immensely grating and near-profane when spliced with a soft-spoken man and soft music–entirely dedicated to episodes of painting tutorials that aired on public access television in the 80’s and 90’s. I’d seen The Joy of Painting some growing up, but I was a little kid when it aired. I can’t pretend I was a diehard fan before the nostalgia-cum-irony-soaked revival of all things sincere and pure in the 2010s, when Bob Ross tat (I can think of no better way to put it–just branded crap) started appearing at art stores and those ‘zany’ gift shops. I do not mean art supplies–I mean things like a Bob Ross chia pet or a Bob Ross waffle maker and other such tat I feel secondhand embarrassment even beholding, stuff that is purely reference and irony and no substance, meme-stuff of the meanest kind.
King of all he sees.
I’m working on a Snufkin costume for this Halloween, and I’ve been re-reading the Moomins books–I re-read a lot of children’s books while on the elliptical–so things Moomin have been hovering about just below my waking mind, or infusing it. (Also after the dentist we went to Goodwill where last week my partner saw a Snufkin painting that may-or-may-not (was not, as it turns out) still be there, so his silhouette was at the edges of my mental canvas, so to speak.) So it is not terribly outlandish or offhand that Moomins were brought to mind when watching Bob Ross. Both are un-apologetically genuine and free of the hyper-self-aware irony that has poisoned everything pop culture since the 90s. This is to say, the source material is.
Moomins have also been relentlessly merchandised, especially in Japan, but it’s stuff I admit I find charming–stationary, my bucket hat, the several Traveler’s Notebook-associated tie-ins that sell scalped for an obscene price. It’s pure mercantilism but it’s genuine in its own way; it sparks joy, whereas the Bob Ross stuff sparks revulsion, horror, almost sorrow, a desperate hoping the dead do not see into the world of the living. I may have bought some of the Moomins TN inserts and shitajiki at MSRP had I the opportunity, but I refuse to fall into one of the more corrosive and insidious aspects of Japanese material pop culture that is bleeding into the Western: limited-edition FOMO completionist accumulation.
It’s the same way I feel about gatcha mechanics and blind boxes working their way into Western products; they are immensely profitable and effective, so of course once the popularity of the Japanese model caught on it would be spread. I have bought blind-box figures and gatcha and it’s a little bit of fun, a bit of dopamine, and don’t have a problem with them any more than I do Pokemon cards themselves–it is the scalping and ruthless monetization that turns me off. Leaving the acquisition of some plastic ephemera up to fate makes of the acquisition a moment, a memory touched by the random flow of the universe. I collect memory triggers. And yet this rent-seeking profiteering was predictable given the hyper-financialization of everything in the US; I see desperation in it, the scramble to have a toehold in an economy that is pushing people out and creating more surplus labor each year. It is merely an extension of the idea of mere ownership being a means of revenue, not the creating of a thing itself.
I guess it is sincerity that I see in common in Ross and Snufkin — peddling, themselves, directly, either nothing (Snufkin, who repeatedly says that possessions are a hindrance to him and so much clutter) or the thing itself, the tools of the trade, the art, the lessons (Ross, during his lifetime), and in parallel do I see that essence of sincerity being sold with meta-products, that is, products about Snufkin and Ross, products featuring. Buying the seeming of something, of freedom, of art by one’s own hand, of living in the moment. Selling the essence of simplicity and non-consumption, the courage in living without pretense, in the doing. This is a form of pure vicariousness. I cannot imagine telling Snufkin I spent $500 on a notebook with his visage–the very idea would revolt him, having his image associated with such, used to manipulate people out of money.
I will not pretend Bob Ross’s popularity is purely attributed to his art; his personality absolutely cinched it, but it is a good personality, a genuine one on balance by all accounts, and that is the sort of charisma I don’t begrudge what-are-now-called ‘influencers’. If one is to be famous for being oneself that self should be admirable. Perfect does not exist and looking for it is seeking to get one’s own heart broken, and denying celebrities the dignity of human complexity and interiority, fallibility; expecting perfection is a form of objectification. But if we’re lionizing somebody purely on personality we can look for on-balance good, good enough. It would be a vast improvement over the current influencer archetype, which seems to be defined by impunity and narcissism and disruptiveness.
**I would also like to report everything looks “excellent” and the gum-pocket test was aced.
*I could not hear Mr. Ross’s voice over the scrape scrape scrape whiiiineeeee going up my jaw and into the roots of my eyes, though I am sure it would have been quite soothing. What I DID hear was the sudden jump in volume and “ARE YOU PAYING TOO MUCH FOR YOUR CAR INSURANCE???”
I just wrote a bunch of shit down somewhat tangentially associated in my thought process (yes, that is my entire blog). I’m not editing this because it’s been sitting open in my browser for like a week. Well, I strongly feel it’s all related.
Equipment Improvement Cycle and the Striving Meritocracy
RPG mechanic rhetoric as life advice is not new to me, personally, because I hang out with nerds who grew up with RPGs and are of a strategic bent, but the past several years the language of ‘maximizing’ and ‘optimizing’ has been prevalent in the mainstream. It’s a comforting response to a world that is fundamentally becoming less fair and a useful belief to encourage in the masses; it’s the meritocracy promise writ in nerd language. It is also useful in that it encourages consumerism–we start to think that purchases we make in real life will ease our lives as purchases in weapon shops ease our battling. To purchase, to upgrade, is an integral part of progressing, of moving the narrative forward. Consuming becomes doing something to materially improve your life–you can feel you at least did something productive today, something that will have an impact in material reality. It’s bad on Instagram if you have hobbies or cats–a nonstop flood of things that will, supposedly, materially elevate the craft or the cat’s QOL.
I am materially improving my ability to get things done and achieve my goals. Look, the number goes up and it turns green. It is very satisfying.
I swear I’ve written about this before — offering the purchase of productivity, when somebody is already feeling kind of shit for doomscrolling. The ads are so tactile–unboxing, opening, the basic physical pleasures one is not experiencing while scrolling but which we sense are on some basic level healing–that they almost feel like a vicarious screen break.
Minmaxing life run, or just maxing and excising the ‘min’
Mid-aughts in the leadup to the Marvel slop movies and the mainstreaming of ‘nerd’ culture there was an in-group heavy, T-shirt sloganeering, pithy take on nerd culture–when it was still being marketed as a true subculture, an offshoot of goth/alternative/hacker culture Hot Topic cashed in on.* Marketing fitness to nerds by using terms such as ‘leveling up’ and ‘grinding’ to mean putting in hours of basic hygiene and basal-level exercise was prevalent, but I could not think of a self-respecting normie–the kind of guy who is fully seeped in Manosphere culture and rhetoric now–who would be associated, voluntarily. I have not yet seen this sort of (formal) marketing for Ozempic/other GLP-1 agonists–the pharmaceutical companies are toeing the line right now by presenting it as a last-resort response to obesity, and their ads feature people who are truly obese, not chubby but looking to lose vanity weight–but I will bet in five, ten years the message will shift toward optimization of the self. I will be interested to see if the average BMI of the “protagonist” of the GLP-1 commercials goes down with time. The thing is, losing weight does make one feel better, physically; one has more energy, physical endeavors are easier, one’s own body is lighter. Anybody who has had weight cycle knows the benefits are not merely aesthetic or psychological.
Conflict/Quest Story
The superhero-narrative-as-jingoistic-propaganda–a more upbeat war propaganda than what I think of as “shoot and cry” films, wherein American soldiers suffer greatly because they’ve had to kill innocent people in combat, and they had no choice–that basically is the Marvel universe started a bit late, a few years after the 9/11 hypernationalist fervor into which a nation itching for a Noble War and a Reason to Live after the End of History was pitched. It functioned as a post-hoc justification for that decade of American invasions, a balm for the public conscience. It does not much matter if it was a conscious decision or not; this was its function. The extent to which this comes of a desire to redeem image after [every war since WWII] I do not know. But it is useful to the powers that be, no matter its source, and so it is encouraged. To have a populace that believes in the myth of its own national good-guy-ness is useful and the general hard right shift in tenor post 9/11 occurred in the penumbra of late 90s WWII romanticism-cum-nostalgia for younger days of the cohort that was aging into retirement.* So much of our media, at that time, catered to the generation that fought World War II, my grandfather’s generation–god knows the war figured large enough in his personal life narrative. All ages were saturated in Good War and Just War narratives, wherein being a part of a military band of brothers was the cure to the modern ails of alienation, ennui, lack of meaning or purpose. These narratives were a balm for the stupor of too much domesticity and predictability at the end of history (wherein History is when exciting things happen and one could make a difference)–in these narratives, and, therefore, during a Just War, one’s individual courage and grit meant something. Being a good bloke with a can-do attitude was enough during the War to make you heroic, a Somebody, part of a community, in the same way that being same pre-de-industrialization was enough to guarantee you a solid job and economic stability. It does not matter if any of this is correct in any objective or measurable sense. It is what the perception was, and perception molds behavior, which includes voting.
Narrative is contextualization, which is the cure for alienation. And the superhero narratives are narratives of conflict.
I’m rehashing somewhat poorly Graeber and Wengrow’s ideas in The Dawn of Everything about the narrative we attach to human history –that History happens, or that life actually progresses, when there is something monumental to document, usually conflict, and all other times are a holding period in the grand narrative of life. Ursula K. Le Guin addresses this sentiment in “Betrayals”, a short story in the collection Four (now Five) Ways to Forgiveness:
What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality.
This is in the broader context of discussing a people whose entire lives have been shaped by conflict and who are at a collective loss for how to find meaning in peace. It is a beautiful collection of stories meditating on multi-generational war trauma, on how ‘victim’ is not a moral standing but a relational standing in a power structure–the experience of being a victim can give insight and empathy but does not preclude seizing the advantage when one has it and acting against others as acted against in the past, so long as that power structure, that way of thinking, remains. But, the basic idea that peacetime is when ‘true life’ proceeds–the idea that life and narrative are not defined by conflict–in itself was powerfully put.
————
*Incidentally, this was the era of mishmash nerd culture wherein the peak of nerd cache was a graphic T shirt integrating two or three fandoms — Luke Skywalker in the TARDIS kind of thing. A lot of the core aesthetics of nerd culture from that era are still prevalent, just now in the mainstream, but the mishmash cross-franchise stuff I have not seen nearly as much.
*This cohort was also aging; nostalgia itself, the recalling of youth and the feeling of your life being ahead of you, is a powerful sell. That their youth coincided with this grand war reinforces in the mind the “real life is conflict” association.
See, we are holding a town hall, to ask if you want our data center built on your land. We are giving you a empowering opportunity: to make decisions by consent.
You see, this data center is going to go up. If you do not consent it will happen anyway, but you will be victims, not agentic deciders of your own fate.
Do you want to live in a democracy or a dictatorship? The choice is yours. Let us instead be partners and avoid all this unpleasantness. Nobody wants to be a victim, after all.
Sick for the second time in three weeks. Something must be going around those little brats. And the freshest cold medicine/antipyretic/analgesic whatever in my cabinet expired in 2022, which might go a long way toward explaining why it feels like I’m not getting my full relief dose-time out of my meds.
Was going to go to Universal FanFest this evening for the Sailor Moon exhibit, but at least they let me reschedule my tickets.
This one’s a real post. Apologies in case anybody has been getting spammed with shitposts. I’m automating crossposting and there’s more debugging (and testing, hence the posts) than anybody ever expects, even though I should damn well know better from script kiddie days back in high school. So that will continue for the near future.
A pilgrim comes seeking fellowship.
Somebody finally said in /r/printSF something I’ve been suspecting–and I do love it when my kneejerk gut takes are proven to be Correct and Wise. There has been a flood of posts fishing for the sort of answer your English teacher would want you to give about a book in AP English, written in AI style. I had not pursued it–my response to my own AI paranoia has been to disengage from everything, which is healthy for somebody who already has a tendency to be a recluse–but of late what were once the last bastions resembling old school message boards on the internet for niche ephemera (the wall-of-text subreddits) are just not engaging me, even though they are trying to start discussions that are in my wheelhouse (Le Guin, Wolfe, old school ‘literary’ scifi, the weeds of theory, etc). The posts have the tenor of a recent convert to the beauty of literature, a pilgrim coming to confess and pray at the altar, seeking the fellowship and validation of the congregation. And, as people generally believe their ‘religions’ are good and should be appreciated more, this is an excellent way to engage them. Yes, including me.
I’m seeing this pilgrim-crawling-to-the-altar and “hello fellow kids” everywhere now even more than I once was; it was bad enough when I suspected people of karma farming and astroturfing, but it was at least a human putting the work in–I could only hope, sometimes, a human who was asking some questions they genuinely wanted to ask as part of their karma-farming, something. Now we are also being triggered into providing some deep, insightful discussions to train an AI algorithm to have deep, insightful discussions. In any case, OP made an astute observation with some concrete evidence of seeding, with more being added down the thread.
Weighted Blanket of the Absurd
Master Shake’s distracting-from-his-hustle philosophical irrelevances that have the bonus quality of having made me laugh hysterically at 2AM as psychological armor.
Yes, I’m well aware this might be AI-calling-out-AI. Anything might be anything. Fuck it. If I’m going to bother participating on the internet at all I at least need to delude myself that there are some signs of life out there. I’m coping with my aughts-adolescent cynicism and ennui with absurdist nihilist flip. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t the most unhealthy coping mechanism I’ve used, and can be quite fun. There’s that old saw about the funniest people you know being the most depressed people you know and having a lot of practice in defusing psychological agony with humor.
Let’s for the moment focus on the aspect of AI that relieves one of having to do things like pay attention to and think about things that are boring, like books and philosophy and history and Big Ideas, that the gatekeepers of your degree/ license to work a more than subsistence job tend to think are Big, Important things for humans to think about. The sort of person who becomes a teacher tends to be the sort of person who believes in the inherent value of Truth and Thought and cultivating the life of the mind and becoming a well-rounded human-cum-citizen, and that sort of person is the the gatekeeper standing between you and your license to work a bullshit white collar job that pays something more than a subsistence wage. You used to have to indulge them, to some extent, or go to effort and expense to get somebody else to do it for you, but there is now an algorithm that pays granular and close attention to those gatekeepers talking amongst themselves in the brainy tl;dr wall-of-text subs about the things they’re going to ask you to write about and grade you on. That’s a lot of attention-energy somebody else already expended and you don’t want to on things that don’t matter to you.
A bullshitter or conman used to have to be a good listener, and good at guessing what people wanted to hear. That skill, bullshitting, is being de-professionalized, too, now; the algorithm whispers into your ear what to say to bullshit or con. Quality bullshitting and knowing what people want to hear is a skill–another one that is being lost. Again the middle is falling out of an entire profession and the only conmen who make a living will be those exceptional individuals with genius charisma. Workaday mediocre conmen need jobs too–more argument for UBI I guess.
I feel the desperation of realizing every safety valve and escape is being shut off or turned into a honeypot or corrupted–‘escapes’ for ‘intellectuals’ or ‘genuine people’ or however we style ourselves are weirs.
Marketers desperately seeking organic ‘cool’ cred for their product isn’t new; shilling and guerilla marketing are nothing new; influencers are just now up front about it, which I find refreshing. There is a desperate cynicism in capitulating to it all being about the game–we’re far from the gen X obsession with not ‘selling out’. Indeed, to care about ‘selling out’ or ‘authenticity’ is seen as a naive, childish, unsophisticated concern, and while gen Z /alpha may be well on to something, it is part of the pattern of their generation never being raised on ‘hope’ or optimism for the future like Millennials-and-older. When I was in middle school ‘poseur’ was a deadly fucking insult if you were in any sort of ‘scene’ with pretensions to authenticity–skating, music, art, fashion. I remember rumors about who had used a butter knife to scuff up the underside of their skateboard to make it look broken in with the sort of wear pattern you would get with ‘hardcore’ use. That was a fighting accusation. And these so-accused were not attempting to be influencers or anything with a monetary reward; they just desperately wanted to be cool and authentic. Authenticity had enough intrinsic value to be something to lose, something precious. It was, in the minds of these middle schoolers, a very real and deadly serious thing. I wonder if younger generations see that sort of totemic belief as naive in the way that believing in ‘capitalism’ (as an ideology of ‘freedom’ or something) seems now, or ‘free enterprise’, or ‘the American dream’.
Considerations of ‘specialness’ aside, this is why people in subcultures condemn ‘selling out’–you make something profitable and the vultures come in and shit all over it. I’ve watched it happen. Anti-gatekeeping rhetoric is being co-opted to stifle conversations about this.
I realize it’s not just getting people to buy shit, monetarily, in a material sense. It’s also political astroturfing, and the everything-sucks-fuck-you pissed off adolescent nihilist philosopher* inside me firmly maintains it’s all the same thing anyway. It is and it isn’t. A healthy criticism of all parties so often just becomes this nihilistic centrism that, functionally, is no different from political neutralization. Trying to sell me mediocre terrycloth hoodies on Instagram is obnoxious but I’m not going to pull the galaxy brain take that it is equivalent to influencing elections. Same tactics, yes–a ‘sale’ is a sale, of ideology or terrycloth hoodies–but equally urgent a threat it is not. The corrosive effect on mutual trust that comes of suspecting either in every interaction is a social enshittification agent, all linked, ultimately, in the big cosmic sense, on big time frames, but in the immediate sense one makes you regret buying bad clothes and the other effectively legalized suspension of due process.
It was mentioned in the original post that many of these suspect accounts also posted in job hunting subreddits, which are utterly lousy with recommendations for resume editors and other magic bullet solutions for desperate over-educated under-employed professionals DOGEd or AIed out of an already shit market**. Maybe this is my naive Millennial belief in the concept of ‘earnestness’ or ‘validity’ but this seems particularly scummy, preying on a need instead of a desire. Doing so is not new but it seems to be one of the few hustle avenues still (or even increasingly) profitable in a collapsing postindustrial economy.
Reddit user lebowskisd: “Yeah, it has really dissuaded me from engaging to the extent that I used to. What I want to believe used to be some earnest questions are now repetitive variations on a theme that feel more like some malevolent entity tapping on my glass enclosure to get me [to] react and be interesting. But, since this is one of the few places I can actually have a discussion about what I’ve read, I keep coming back.”
The Dude(‘s D?) puts it well. Some entity listening in to the place where the eggheads go to escape and trying to prompt discussion to harvest.
Reddit user Beneficial-Neat-6200: “Agreed. Over on r/wallstreetbets the prevailing theory is that the value of rddt more related to monetization of user content for Ai training than from advertising”
This is probably correct. I still see a market for vendors of niche products to hobbyists, many of whom, if they are on Reddit, have disposable income and tend to limit Google searches of product reviews to Reddit or other websites where ‘real people’ used to hang out. They’ve always been lousy with shills, and everybody knows it, but it was also one of the few places to get an honest opinion mixed in there.
Reddit user Possible-Advance3871: “I know the common theory is theyโre used to inflate Reddit user stats or train AI, but I think theyโre also being used for guerilla marketing.ย I saw something similar in the television subreddit. I searched for discussions about a certain show and found one from a while ago. Randomly in the middle of the passage, they mentioned a gambling website which was curiously in a slightly different font so it stood out. It said the post had been edited a week after its initial posting.ย I suspect they make posts like these to build credibility for the user accounts and to create discussions that hit all the SEO bullshit so they pop up in searches. Then they edit in product placement for people who search for them later. Since all the comments have already been made, no ones going to talk about the product placement and they wonโt get reported.”
I admit I had never noticed this pattern before, even though I’ve been trawling through ‘old’ threads looking for info my entire internet life. Such product placements probably just got caught in my bullshit filter and immediately disregarded as brand shit, but I never bothered to look up the editing timestamp because I did not care. But this is critical–it is a piece of what, exactly, bolsters the monetary value of a ‘trusted source’.
Reddit user Ill_Refrigerator_593: “Personally I find it hard to resist a Le Guin post.” User robot_rabbit: “that’s why they used her name specifically”
Me too, Ill_Refrigerator-san. The authors being featured in these suspect posts seems to be a who’s-who gallery of what I have heard referred to as “your favorite author’s favorite author” – highly-praised literary luminaries who may (Le Guin) or may not (most of the rest of them) be popular. Also likely to be the favorite authors of the sort of person who is going to put themselves into the position of gatekeeping your degree or interview vis-ร -vis going into teaching, or the authors people list as ‘favorites’ if they want to seem intellectual and deep and from that trustworthy, above petty considerations such as money and popularity, genuine.
Reddit user chrooooo: “A movie based on a Le Guin will be announced soon.”
Fucking hell, you may be right. Now I’ll be suspicious and surly instead of mildly, reservedly interested. While I never had much hope for adaptations from other sources, Ghibli Earthsea burned me too badly. I’ll be bitter about that one until the earth falls into the sun.
Daily I am more convinced of the existential need to retreat to a shack in the woods.
Fine. Those online spaces are all compromised. So now what? Limit ourselves to the people within easy physical meeting distance? That’s lonely work if you have niche interests. The internet was the first time, for better or worse, all these niche weirdos found a welcoming lounge-cum-echo chamber, and it was the most high quality social interaction many of us had for years, especially if we lived in a small town in what is now MAGA country. Part of how those spy camera/microphone ‘glasses’ are going to pay for themselves in data harvesting is through eavesdropping on these conversations we take offline, if we can, when we can. When might somebody get paid hourly to hang out in a bookstore or coffee shop wearing those***? Your employment manual will recommend very obviously ‘reading’ a book that may start the conversations your client wants, or painting, or wearing a shirt with an unfortunate opinion. If there is a hierarchy in pay based on how pleased clients are with the information you get there will be an incentive for the best bullshitters do this work–a resurgence of the ‘peer influencer’, who influences people who do not like influencers. AI paranoia is going to creep into IRL conversations–not just in the sense of AI being fed as answers through an earbud or lens so you can get laid or get a job or sell something, but also in the sense of being harvested, used to train skinwalkers to seem more human. ‘Authenticity’ will always be the most coveted thing a marketer will seek, no matter what the product being sold.
Paranoia is isolating and exhausting. I keep seeing reasons it is an accurate response to one’s environment, not an individual pathology, necessarily. The same issue with depression or anxiety being an appropriate response to life circumstances.
——-
*This is the same entity that thought Trent Reznor’s rendition of Closer at Coachella was fucking sick as fuck.
**Hi.
***Even if like one out of a thousand of those conversations yield anything interesting it is still of value to information brokers. Also if you’re hiring I have two elderly cats with high needs and could use the scratch.
I justify to myself being spendy at the gift shops of museums, national parks, other nonprofits, etc, as providing ‘support’. Either way both of us benefit and from a utilitarian perspective that is a good thing, questions about ‘true altruism’ or other abstractions aside. So I don’t sweat it too much.
I picked up American Indian Myths and Legends (editor/compilers Erdoes and Ortiz, Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library) book at the Joshua Tree NP gift shop. This is a book seemingly tailored to my interests–sociology, mythology, anthropology, a generous helping of annotations from scholars, a clean minimalist book cover that would pair in a lovely way with other volumes of the same series on my bookshelf, sturdy paperback. I do like the use of large blocks of pattern and the sidebar summary in this Pantheon printing; the entire effect is charming, gives a clean ‘universal’ impression, free from proprietary this or that or over-reliance on one person’s interpretation based on their illustration. Anyway, I’ve been picking through it between other books and I last night got to the portion on war-and-valor-related myths, the introduction of which mentions the coup stick, which triggered a memory that has not been unearthed for probably thirty years. Proust’s madeleines and involuntary memory again. I was familiar with this concept. I had heard about it, a time buried in the distant past. I had not since read about it, so I was inundated with that-timeness; I was for that moment a schoolchild in awe of the ways of others, so different from my own that they seemed inherently mystical.
The untouched memories
These are my memories before I taint them with further research, using the terms my memory uses (i.e. what I would have learned as a Texas schoolchild in the 90s):
A notion of a special “coo stick”. I visualize something like Sokka-from-Avatar’s war club, an embedded jewel the stick cups like a wave. A sense of an Indian warrior sitting straight and proud, very proper, on a horse, riding up to a white invader, tapping them gently on the head, and bolting. No sense of hurry or danger from the Indian. Serenity and poise, making a game of something the White man treats as deadly serious. A child’s budding sense of ‘are we the baddies?’ I am in a classroom. Classroom walls, the bright primary colors, construction-paper cutout headings on bulletin boards. When I visualize-read the term “coo stick” so Anglicized it further triggers the memory–this must be phrase I had only ever heard, specifically.
Rarity of experience
I grapple with involuntary memory quite a bit. That, in itself, is not infrequent for me. It is however unusual for me to access a bit of intellectual trivia that has not been touched, as far as I can sense, in decades, especially when it resides within the realm of things I regularly explore (in this case sociology/mythology/history etc), so I want to sit with it a while, turn it over in my hands, before I go off on a reading spree to update my knowledge.
Once a church stood here. But I’ve deconstructed it, scavenged it for my own use, pick the island clean of resources, and even used it as a dump for my volcanic ash and beach sand seriously I can only make so much glass waste, and not a soul or a ‘mon is harmed. It’s abandoned. It’s free real estate. What a relief, that such islands exist, there to be scoured clean of resources and left with the trash, and that nobody is harmed or dispossessed. Ethically clean.
The blank eyes of the devouring maw that sucks up all of value.
I am sinking far too much time into Pokopia. Well, I feel as though I am–I see some of the elaborate builds people did within the first week of release and wonder if I should invest more time. This middling time-sinking feels the ultimate waste — either go into it fully or don’t at all. But that’s always been my problem — obsession with optimization to the point of paralysis, do it all or don’t do it at all, do it right or don’t bother. Even if it’s a damn video game. Somebody years ago on the internet said “Do not treat games like homework,” and it has stuck with me. This means not forcing oneself to finish games one really is not feeling, nor getting into a perfectionist snit. When it stops being intrinsically fun, the value is lost.
Video games are tricky, especially games with a creative element like Pokopia or, oh, Minecraft is next to come to mind, or games that require strategy. There is a creative element in playing them that goes far beyond simple consumption of Funko Pops or whatever. It is the relationship between the brickmaker* and the architect. To be generative within the milieu that is already established (example: to be one of the most influential Pokopia build gurus) means a time commitment to a very deliberate and intense delve into somebody else’s product, something that does take considerable time and dedication. The Serebii Pokopia controversy lays bare the exhaustive labor that comes of being The Authority on a game–clearly, it is labor, it has value, otherwise why would people try to (1) appropriate it and (2) avoid it. This is the literary critic who has built their career around one author, writ with a more populist bent. It is painstaking, exacting work, the sort we acknowledge with the title ‘doctor’, and not undeservedly. This is something adjacent to science, but within this analogy God is the game creator(s), and we are laboring tirelessly to understand their design. Part of the sale point of the game is the mystery that was created, left to be enjoyed on levels from just-dicking-around (hi) to excavation and cataloguing, experimenting. But games have always been ‘pointless’ and yet what we live for, something that compels us as much as art.
The game designers, however, designed their worlds for maximum engagement and enjoyment–this means a universal constant of (ultimate) fair play, of getting out what you put in being guaranteed if you stick with it. “God” or whoever is responsible for this ‘real world’ was not so generous. The game is rigged not to be rigged against you. It certainly is rigged for you, which gives one a sense of effortless agency.
I’ve talked about the idea of future-nostalgia, also within the context of a video game that gives me an immense sense of peace. Pokopia is this soft post-apocalypse dream manifest — an empty world, green, cleansed, healed from the excesses of former civilization but retaining many of the fruits of that excess. The payment has already been made and we the innocent Pokemon are here to collect and rebuild. There is enough housing–more than enough, for each person to have their own customized space. While this isn’t in Pokopia as much of an issue there are jobs, ‘places’, for everybody; everybody gets to contribute in a meaningful way, best according to their talents. The world has room. And it is eight billion of us all dreaming of a world scoured clean of probably seven billion of our fellow humans, eight billion overlapping dream worlds in 7/8 of which you are in the way.
That is something I notice with a lot of ‘cozy’ games, a lot of speculative-utopian settings: there’s a damn lot less of us humans taking up space, resources, jobs, making traffic. And there are few enough humans that each person has a chance to be known as an individual, in some capacity, by a community, has a ‘place’ for their talents and interests. This is the world dreamed of by the person who sends out hundreds of job applications to get no response, who cannot find work in their degree field, who cannot afford a home, who cannot get noticed or published or discovered or an audience and can only pray for the capricious selection of virality to make them one of the ones who made it. But we want this already-done, not a decision we had to make or an atrocity we had to commit–that is the key cozy component.
It is what the pioneers who went West were promised — an empty world, a canvas that has already been broken in and made hospitable by a previous people, except in the case of the real American West the “people” were not as gone as the pioneers were led to believe. I was reading about the Donner Party again (my Libby hold for The Indifferent Stars Above finally came available after some weeks) which is possibly the clearest illustration of the dire risk taken by families striking out west–basically, the worst that could happen, did happen. This is supposedly my blood, these people (Westward pioneers, not the Donners), and yet I find myself questioning if I would have the stomach to risk such a fate, or if I would have stayed east of the Mississippi, or, going further back, in Europe. It is hindsight that tells me this “open land”, this massive safety valve for the discontent of the masses, was not actually free real estate but seized from a dispossessed people who were cleared out with genocide and disease to make room for the white influx. Whether or not the first wave of disease was intentional or not is immaterial; it happened. I understand why the pioneers reacted with rage when they got to the promised land and found it taken. They had indeed been lied to–sold a bill of goods. They had risked and lost immensely for that lie. They were indeed brave, they did hold up their end of the bargain. But no disappointment, no pain, excuses taking it out on an innocent party. The overwhelming bone-deep feeling of ‘it’s not fair!’ does not excuse harm done to others. Coexistence would have been one thing, a compromise, but they wanted what was promised–what, indeed, is owed to every person, what every person deserves, freedom, self-sufficiency, dignity, but cannot be seized from an innocent other if you lack it. But rage for elites thousands of miles and years away by wagon doesn’t have much of an outlet; it tends to boil over onto what is closest, what manifests the ‘obstacle’, what, if only it did not exist, would make the world perfect. The fly in the ointment, the other person laying down a boundary. If I had the knowledge of history I would have migrated acknowledging that I was an immigrant into somebody else’s land, not pushing into terra incognita, and would make my calculations knowing this. And, had I migrated late enough in history, it would indeed be a (relatively) cleared-out frontier; all that unpleasantness would be in the past and I could reason that me not going west was not going to bring those Indians back to life. I can understand the bitterness of people who do awful things at being vilified; later generations get to recoil from what was done to ensure their current hegemony or prosperity and pretend they would never, while reaping the benefits. People are awfully eager to bury the hatchet when things have already shaken out in their favor–because they get to be technically right (eye for an eye makes the whole world blind and all that) as well as sitting safely in a position of material advantage.
I will bet in a generation or so Israel will be all over itself to apologize for the genocide its ancestors committed, but, oh well, what is done is done, and here we Israelis are in a Gaza that was ethnically cleansed to make room for us. A people being very contrite from their wadi bungalows and seaside condos. I know this because my own people did it and I find it exhausting, the land acknowledgements and all that. Either give the land back or shut up; at least conservatives are being honest when they say they do not intend to make right. It is very convenient to have a cultural belief that contriteness after the fact erases the burden of sin. It is a belief rooted in truth–that the past is past, and cannot be changed, and we are flawed–but who benefits?
We’ve (white Americans) also overpopulated such that we can’t just go back from where we came from–Europe (the world, really) hasn’t the capacity or desire to absorb all of us, as Americans looking to expatriate in this political climate are finding out. So, yes, there is nothing to be done, the guilty parties either got their cosmic justice or never will, and it all works out rather neatly because the sins are in the past. ไปๆนใใชใ.
We’re still dreaming of the frontier–just an ethical frontier, where this time the former occupants really are all gone and have left behind a world of ruins upon which to build a new society. The self-poisoning excesses of the former society killed them, ultimately, but we (the future people) benefit from the hyper-accumulation they’ve left behind. It’s all out there to be salvaged. The infrastructure and general world-shaping that was barely keeping up with an overpopulation is, transplanted to this new, much smaller population, abundance for all. Much as Marx argued that industrial capitalism must precede communism, hyper-exploitation and excess set up the infrastructure for a comfortable post-scarcity. The evil’s been done, the bill paid, and we the innocent current generation inherit Elysium. And we are truly innocent–we did not do any of the misdeeds of the past, did not commit the sins of our fathers–but we must acknowledge also that we benefit. Those who ‘lost’ the conflict and might be owed something have been buried by clean, healing time, the slate wiped clean.
So, you can find a church and deconstruct it brick by brick, move it to your own homestead, and what you’ve done is entirely a creative act, dispossessing nobody–indeed, an act of redemption, of recycling, of thrift and industriousness. The people who originally built the church are conveniently gone to allow that. And there is excess for everybody, and the world was allowed to heal from its accumulation, but we get the benefits.
————
*All my fire Pokemon: I told you to get to work on firing bricks and you’re just lounging around; when there is clay in the community box that means SOMEBODY needs to step up. I don’t have this much trouble with the concrete mixers or the furnaces**; somehow Pokemon know that raw materials laid out beside them mean it’s time to step up.
**It’s also the fire Pokemon. They’re good about the furnaces. I have to drag them by the ear to the community box and show them up close and very specifically that there is clay waiting to be fired, and yes, the community box is usually right next to the furnaces, so they’re clearly walking past the entire setup with selective vision. The recycling Pokemon ignoring the trash in the community box also need to step up or I need to deputize Scyther*** to be an enforcer because he’s clearly the only one who checks the damn box.
***I put logs in the community box and it is always Scyther who is on top of it. Thank you, Scyther, specifically; I hope you have a good day.
NOTE: This was originally my preamble to my review of The Algebraist, but it went off the rails enough to be in blog territory.
My patience for reading things that start a bit of a slog but pay off โin the endโ is high. I admire any artist or writer who in this day of dopamine hyper-addiction and micro entertainments is willing to ask the reader to have faith and take the long slog, as it will pay off in the end. (Or, probably more to the point, the publishing house willing to publish it.) This wasnโt as much of an Ask in 2004, when The Algebraist was published, but in 2024, when Orbit started republishing Banksโ works with a new minimalist Windows screen saver aesthetic cover design, it was.
This is a constant of Banksโ worksโhyper-detailed, unexplained jargon, blow-by-blow decontextualized action that only on looking back completely makes sense. Use of Weapons is possibly most exemplary of this of his works, with the most famous payoff. Tor is putting out new versions of The Book of the New Sun, which asks faith that moves mountains–in the face of four books of what might as well be post-apocalypse Jabberwocky for all the sense it makes in the first read-throughโthat it all ties together, eventually, so perhaps there is an appetite for this sort of slow investment again. I wonder how much of that โdemandโ is fueled by self-disgust in people whose attention spans are utterly shot, who want to force themselves to appreciate something โslowโโthe anxiety of intellectuals who are, unfortunately, caught in the same damn trap as the rest of society, but have the burden of being aware and ashamed of it. I cheer on anybody who is trying to undo the dopamine addiction, the scattershot three-screens-at-once attention span. Iโve fallen into it myself and had to claw myself back out of it.
Well, Banks and Wolfe are both decorated authors, multiple-winners of prestigious awards, the favorite-author-of-your-favorite-author as I once heard it put, and that reputation itself does a lot of lifting of the marketing. A โclassicโโan accomplishment to have read, a victory for the struggling dopamine addict intellectual. Perhaps that designation is carrying a lot of the decision to re-print. Kind of a moot point, perhaps, to ask if these books โcould have been published todayโ because the weight of the designation of โclassicโ and the endorsement of popular contemporary authors primes the reader with far more fortitude and patience than they would bring to opening a new book from an unknown author. I admit I am no differentโI trust Banks, so I give him more grace when Iโm not jiving with the work immediately, and the payoff comes in the last twenty or so pages.
The ones who tell our stories
The old advice to โgrab the reader immediatelyโ only seems more urgent, nowโthe adage that you have a page to grab the reader/editor seems almost quaint and naively generous. You have a catchphrase, a list of tropes. What works are we losing because publishers are too aware of this taste of the market? And what brilliant writers with asocial souls are not getting published? Leaning into questions of identity-as-shaping-narrative, what narratives do we necessarily lose when that sort of person is locked out of publishing? Does the soul of the BookTokker have within it The Brothers Karamazov or Always Coming Home? That aspect of the human experience simply is not being printed. It is not โbetterโ or more โvalidโ than the modern social media socialite soul, but I lament that there is no place for it.
This begs questions about the emperorโs new clothes, and our ability to accurately evaluate a work โof its own meritsโ (implied: decontextualized, which is impossible). Iโve thought a great deal about meta-narratives readers impose upon authorsโ works, something that seems only to have gotten more prevalent with hyperfocus on identity in interpreting oneโs words. Indeed, to do thisโto โthink about who is saying this, and whyโโis now a stated imperative in leftish circles, and while it does have a materialist bent (we are shaped by our circumstances) it is the sort of belief that leads to the Isabell Fall tragedy: the โattack helicopterโ story in Clarkesworld that was condemned as โdangerousโ outright and the only possible mitigation being Fallโs identity: that only a trans voice could be trusted to parody anti-trans speech in good faith. She was pushed to out herself as a trans woman. She did not want to out herself, originally; she just wanted to publish a story and have it stand of its own merits, for the tongue-in-cheek to be evident to any reader with a brain. Anonymity as condemnationโpart of a larger trend online of finding pseudonyms suspect because they might obscure that a person is out of their lane, so to speak.
(Note: I wrote the bulk of this a month ago, when the murder of Alex Pretti was still fresh news. It’s been years since a month ago.)
Alexander Aksakov/Getty — Prison Castle, Siberia, Dostoevsky’s “Dead House”
I’m not very disciplined even in whatever self-imposed ad-hoc ethical system I’ve imposed upon myself. I believe–intellectually–that good and evil are things that you do, not things that you are. And yet I find myself thinking of people as good or evil, or liking or not liking them, if I do not keep a short rein on my thoughts.
I have an old friend in prison. He is, I would say, a good man, who did something horrible. He had a psychotic break in a country (and milieu within that country, furthermore) that provides miserly help for mental health while providing generously for ease of access to guns. (I will say this: a man will not ‘seek help’ if said seeking ends his career, and he has a wife and child to support. This is to say nothing of a disease the very pathology of which obscures ones insight of self. But there are those windows of clarity, those moments of “what am I doing”, those moments when there’s an intervention, and because of the first concern you’ve squandered that.) How do I reconcile “good” with this? Genuine repentance, genuine horror and regret. I suppose “feeling” can be “doing”.
Anyway, I finally read Notes from a Dead House by Dostoevsky, a thinly-veiled autobiography about his time at hard labor in Siberia for being part of a socialist literary circle in a Tsarist Russia that had just been given quite a fright by the goings-on to the west in Europe in 1848, and so was particularly inclined to punish anything red-tainted with a heavy hand. I want to send a copy of this to my friend in prison. (He is not going to leave prison.) Tiresome as I am sure it is to have everybody define your life by ‘being in prison’ it is An Experience and a consuming one, and Dostoevsky’s humanity and love for his fellow prisoners is emblematic of the very best tendencies of the Christian tradition, what I consider closest to that of the compassion of the Biblical Christ. It is a compassion that does not deny that some of these men are scoundrels that would stab you for a dram of vodka, but they are men, for all that, and have an inherent human dignity and an inherent goodness they can choose, should they choose. Timshel. And ‘thou mayest’ be more likely to choose compassion when you are treated with dignity. Anyway, I wanted to pick his brain on how much Dostoevsky’s observations hold up with his own, with regard to the nature of man in captivity. He is a thoughtful and quiet man who helps his fellow prisoners get their letters and numbers, as he’s one of those rare breed of educated prisoners, not to make too fine a point on the extent to which ‘criminality’ coincides with ‘economic necessity’.
It doesn’t much matter because that state just decided that prisoners can no longer receive books, even straight from Amazon. I somehow doubt a book known for exploring the humanity of the incarcerated and the corrosive effect power has on those who wield it would make it past censors in the most permissive systems, but I am still pissed. I just donated a few bags of paperbacks to my local prison system (it’s one of the more permissive in the country, which is saying little), mostly science fiction and fantasy, nothing that would raise eyebrows, but all passing my personal and rigorous quality standards as Something Worth Reading, and I felt warm imagining somebody finding something good to read, something to take their minds outside the walls and speak to them as a human with inherent dignity.
Voluntary executioners
I keep what could generously be called a zibaldone–or less generously, a collection of scrawling and scribbling and doodling whatever is cluttering up my mind or whatever quotes hit me–and unsurprisingly one can trace what I’ve been reading by trawling through my notebooks. (I date sketches; that’s about it as regards organization.)* Notes from a Dead House was on my list long before the recentunpleasantnessup north and maybe my subconscious drove me to pick it of all the books on my queue, having been marinated in all this unfortunate to-do and misunderstanding of Rashomon-like subtlety.
“There are people, like tigers, who have a thirst for licking blood. A man who has once experienced this power, this unlimited lordship over the body, blood, and spirit of a man just like himself, created in the same way, his brother by the law of Christ; a man who has experienced this power and the full possibility of inflicting the ultimate humiliation upon another being bearing the image of God, somehow involuntarily loses control of his sensations. Tyranny is a habit; it is endowed with development, and develops finally into an illness. I stand upon this, that the best of man can, from habit, become coarse and stupefied to the point of brutality. Blood and power intoxicate: coarseness and depravity develop; the most abnormal phenomenon become accessible and, finally, sweet to the mind and feelings. Man and citizen perish forever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, becomes almost impossible for him. What’s more, the example, the possibility, of such self-will has a contagious effect on the whole of society: power is seductive. A society that looks indifferently upon such a phenomenon is itself infected at its foundation. In short, the right of corporal punishment, granted to one man over another, is one of the plagues of society, one of the most powerful means of annihilating in it any germ, any attempt at civility, and full grounds for it’s inevitable and ineluctable corruption.”
I wasn’t even much thinking on the corrosion to the soul that is being given power over another human being–the corrosive effect on any person, even a ‘good’ person–maybe because I read that chapter within a few hours of the murder of Alex Pretti. I was thinking on what Dostoevsky called “voluntary executioners” in the translation I read.
There are two kinds of executioners, those who of their own will are executioners and those who are executioners by duty, by reason of office.
Bad people. People who are bad. Fundamentally broken. I was not practicing my equanimity, my defining-people-only-as-doing; I was thinking about the sort of person who joins ICE because it looks like good fun. Do I wish to believe in the existence of the ‘voluntary executioner’ who is somehow more intrinsically bad, more evil, than the ‘involuntary executioner’ who only takes on this role through economic desperation or plain naivety and is through the corrosive poison of the very nature of the job itself made into a bad person? I am again going against my sincerely-held belief that evil is what somebody does, not what somebody is, but there are people who take such glee in inflicting pain I admit I see them as ghoulish. Well, it is perhaps more comforting to think that there are people just ‘born wrong’, independent of intellectual disability or brain malformation, than that anybody, even the kindest person, has the germ of this cruelty within them, and it is only a matter of choosing whether or not to nurture it. Timshel. Some natures make choosing evil more pleasurable or less painful than it is to others, perhaps. I can only hold that it is not fair that some people have innate checks on cruelty and others do not, but though it is not somebody’s fault they were born with low empathy or sadistic tendencies, it remains their responsibility to manage it. It is not fair, but it is. Fair and not-fair, deserving and not-deserving, are ultimately distractions, child’s excuses; one deals with what is.
Are they different and does it matter, when the trigger is pulled on a gun pointed at a man’s back? Why do I want it to matter, when a bullet kills just as surely no matter the thoughts or inner self or true self or what-the-fuck-ever of the person squeezing the trigger?
This hurts you more than it hurts me
I have yet to see a category of person who supports ICE: a person who thinks that what is being done is necessary, but dislikes how much pain it causes. I have seen nobody with the surgeon’s sobriety at inflicting ‘necessary’ pain. All I see is glee that pain is being inflicted.
Is there a person who thinks all the raids are ‘necessary’ (for… the health of the country, I guess) and who also acknowledges and grieves all the human misery it is causing?
Even indifference, self-preserving callousness, would let me know there is still a soul in there that needs to be guarded. Or, it means that one does not see the people suffering as fully ‘human’ or believe that they are truly ‘suffering’, which is its own defect of the soul.
Who do what is necessary
I’ve been on the internet long enough that I’m difficult to surprise with pretty much any level of pretentiousness or self-delusion, but the DHS penguin tweet (I’m not linking to it) just about did it.
My first thought was that “Americans have always known โwhyโ [the penguin walks away]” was a reference to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, the sort of delusional reading of a story I saw so often wherein people manifestly bad, manifestly on the side of wrong (here I go again with those value judgements) interpret an unambiguous parable about self-denial in doing what is right as in some way having something to do with them doing what is wrong, but taking on the ‘self-denial’ of the esteem of their fellow humans who just refuse to see that they are only doing what must be done, unpleasant as it might be. It’s the primary balm to the soul of somebody who does something evil — to re-frame it as something that is Unpleasant but Necessary, to recast oneself as the equivalent of the outcastes who took on unclean jobs like corpse disposal and butchery that were necessary to the functioning of society, but that nobody wanted to think much about, just reap the benefits of, and then hate the people doing the deed from which they benefited, from which they were spared guilt. A proud, stoic person who loves humanity so deeply, so purely, that they will do what is necessary even if those people who benefit hate them.
How does this square with my earlier complaint about ghoulish joy? I guess butchers cannot have too much empathy for the cows they slaughter, but they don’t like it when their children run from them because they smell of blood.
——–
*If you are picturing one of the ~aesthetic~ strictly-formatted and regimented journals, the sort of spread that looks just lovely on an Instagram or Pintrest with neat handwriting and makes you want to go analogue… well, keep picturing that if it encourages you to keep a notebook; I’ve found the practice immensely gratifying, but nobody is going to look at my notebooks and get inspired.**
**I do like looking at ~aesthetic~ journals and hipster-ass stationary pages; my follow list on personal Instagram is a shameful catalogue of actually now that I think about it precisely the sort of marketing nonsense I’ve ranted about.
